Antwerp [ENA] The International News Media Association (INMA) has alerted members to possible advertising gain because of the “waning trust in Facebook”, the social network giant. Since user trust had become currency in advertising this offered a “golden opportunity to publishers” to showcase the trust they had developed with their users. They also needed to prioritize their brand safety efforts.

INMA’s May 1 newsletter quoted a senior manager of the Strategic Partnership SendtoNews as saying while Google and Facebook had no way to police 100% of the contents on their platforms, publishers did. According to Philippe Guay a new poll by the MGH communications agency shows that 70 per cent of respondents don’t trust Facebook to keep their personal information secure, and privacy concerns were further highlighted by Facebook’s announcement most of its two billion users may have had their personal data scraped. He said that because of brand safety concerns Elon Musk had pulled Tesla and SpaceX pages from Facebook and Mozilla and Pep Boys had suspended all advertising until the platform had taken action to strengthen privacy settings.

“So when advertisers start to look to publishers, it’s important you prioritize putting as much brand-safe content on your site as possible,” Guay said referring to full-page advertisements in newspapers around the world Facebook had taken out to apologize to users. Ads in proven and established news publications inherently performed better than on social media platforms, and Facebook was trying to capitalize on that, according to Guay. While apologetic in his testimony before congress, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had admitted his company had not gone far enough to prevent the platform from doing harm.

Brand safety was a major reason publishers needed to look at third-party video providers with brand-safe content at their core. Advertisers were now looking to brand safe but engaging content like sports where their brands were more likely to be protected. “The money marketers spend on digital video is growing at the fastest rate of all options. We have also illustrated that all video isn’t created equal. To ensure engaged and growing viewership and maximum revenue, publishers need to have high-quality, user-engaging video on their sites,” the INMA newsletter quotes Guay.

The concern of trust had become so top-of-mind many blue chip companies like Bank of America had hired “brand safety officers,” whose sole job was to ensure their advertisements don’t appear on unsavory platforms or near questionable content. If publishers filled their site with trusted and safe content, advertisers who prioritized the security of their brand would surely to take notice.

In online advertising, brand safety refers to practices and tools ensuring that an ad will not appear in a context that can damage the advertiser’s brand. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a non-profit New York City-based advertising business organization that develops industry standards, lists general types of potential avoidance categories including adult content, drugs/ alcohol/controlled substances, extreme graphic/explicit violence, hate/profanity
and un-moderated user-generated content. Another aspect of brand safety is the choice to avoid some news contexts like a cruise line doesn’t want its ad to appear alongside shipwreck news.